CALAMITY HOWLER/A.V. Krebs

Must reading

RATS IN THE GRAIN: The Dirty Tricks and Trials of Archer
Daniels Midland The Supermarket to the Worldby James B. Lieber [Four Walls Eight Windows Press, New York,
New York]

Dubbed the "best documented corporate crime in American history"
one realizes in reading James B. Lieber's riveting and authoritative
account of the recent criminality and trials of Archer Daniels
Midland and its executives that had it not been for that
"documentation" the "Supermarkup to the World" and its world-wide
price fixing machinations in lysine, citric acid and high fructose
corn syrup ("HFCS") would have gone unpunished.

As a lay person reading this lawyer/journalist's account of not
only the crimes for which ADM as a corporation was charged and fined,
but the trial, conviction and sentencing of its executives, Mick
Andreas, Terrance Wilson and Mark Whitacre, one cannot help but feel
had it been left to the US Department of Justice's witness testimony
in the courtroom justice would not only have not been done, but not
even seen to be done.

As one juror remarked after the convicting of Wilson, "the
situation was so clear. The tapes were so incriminating," and the
jury consensus of Andreas' guilt was based on videos of price fixing
meetings he held with ADM's "competitors" for as Lieber notes
"without those tapes, he probably would have been freed."

As readers of The Progressive Populist know, Mark Whitacre,
while president of the company's Bioproducts Division, made some 239
surveillance tapes in his three years as an FBI mole (1992-95) while
the FBI itself made a number of videotapes of meetings of ADM
executives and their international corporate price fixer
counterparts.

Not only would the eventual outcome of the ADM trials been
doubtful without the aforementioned incriminating tapes, but as
Lieber explores in his 418-page book, given the rather questionable
resolve of the US Department of Justice to thoroughly investigate,
prosecute and divulge the details of the multitude of crimes that had
become part and parcel of ADM's corporate culture, whether justice
would have been served at all while the public was kept in the dark
by a disinterested national media.

One also wonders, for example, how much of the little enough
coverage that was given to the ADM affair by the national media would
have materialized if it were not for the person of David Hoech, a
dissident ADM shareholder and critic and writer of the
Shareholders Watch newsletter.

Greed versus greed buried in the business section

"After Whitacre exposed ADM," Lieber writes, "the media mobbed the
story, touting it as a David and Goliath parable. After the exposer
was exposed, the press drifted away. Good versus evil inside a
multinational corporation was front-page news. Greed versus greed was
buried in the business section, if it made the paper at all.

"In a tabloid culture," he notes, "trials of gruesome crimes
generate the most news. Searing tragedies for those involved, they
become gladiatorial spectacles for the rest of us. But bloodless
while collar trials say more about the way the world works, and it is
my my personal bias that it makes sense to pay more attention to
them."

Clearly Hoech agreed, for as Lieber notes he did not let the story
die. Rather, in the years since the FBI raided ADM's headquarters in
Decatur, Ill., on June 27, 1995, Hoech maintained constant contact
with reporters from the New York Times, Wall Street
Journal, Chicago Tribune, the Decatur
Herald-Review, Bloomberg News Service and a number of other
free-lance journalists (including this reviewer).

As Lieber notes: "He supplied them with leads that they often
followed and sometimes with ADM or government documents, including
tape transcripts. Some reporters questioned his motivation, and at
times his sanity, but most kept coming back for more. Hoech never let
the case get out of the news or relaxed pressure on ADM."

As Hoech himself exclaims, "the law prostituted brings chaos and
chaos brings on dictatorship. Democracy functions best when people
stand up. That's all I'm doing. People call me and say you don't know
who you are up against. I say Dwayne [Dwayne O. Andreas, former
ADM CEO, Board Chairman and a major political party funder]
doesn't know what he's up against."

Indeed, as one reads through Lieber's book, one sees not only the
contempt for the public -- "the competitor is our friend, the
consumer is our enemy" was the popular ADM refrain -- but where the
law was indeed prostituted in the ADM case, for Rats In The
Grain is a story of a corporate culture of corruption and
manipulation.

'Williams & Connolly controlled the investigation'

In the telling of this story of a corporate culture of corruption
and manipulation Lieber believes:

"There is a reason for this book. And the reason is to show how
the story involving Mark Whitacre, Terry Wilson and Mick Andreas and
others did not just happen. It was a natural step in the development
of a corporate culture. And as a lawyer, I'm interested in whether
the law can actually deal with big, structural, difficult problems.
... The law did work. But much of the story in the book is about how
the law and law enforcement was constrained by ADM's power."

In an interview with the Corporate Crime Reporter's Russell
Mokhiber, the author elaborates:

"I don't think Microsoft has the power to go to the Justice
Department and say, 'limit your attention to this aspect of my
criminal behavior. Don't look over at that aspect of my criminal
behavior.' But ADM was able to do that."

Questioned as if he was saying that ADM and its law firm, Williams
& Connolly, persuaded the Justice Department not to prosecute all
of ADM's wrongdoing, Lieber replied:

"The Justice Department was prevailed upon by Williams &
Connolly to limit its investigation to the fraud investigation." How
did Lieber know that? "From FBI records, and then I talked about it
with the FBI. The FBI said Williams & Connolly controlled the
investigation."

It was the politically powerful law firm of Williams &
Connolly that represented ADM unsuccessfully in its price fixing suit
filed against it by the US Department of Justice. ADM was
subsequently fined $100 million for its role in a world-wide scheme
to fix prices in the $650 million-a-year international lysine market
and also in the citric acid market and Mick Andreas, Wilson and
Whitacre were sentenced to two years in jail and fined each $350,000
for their part in conspiring with Japanese and Korean companies in
the fixing of said prices.

Lieber relates that he learned in his research that there existed
a strict agreement of separation between the anti-trust division and
fraud section -- a "Chinese wall" -- that prevented antitrust from
playing any role in the fraud case, much as it would keep fraud out
of the antitrust trial.

The fraud aspect of the case centered around the fact that shortly
after the FBI raided ADM's offices ADM accused Whitacre of embezzling
over $9 million from the company by means of bogus invoices and
off-shore accounts and filed suit in Switzerland seeking to recover
the funds. Whitacre meanwhile claimed that ADM President Jim Randall
had approved all the payments as "special bonuses," with the first
one timed approximately at the same time Mick Andreas first insisted
that he meet and work with Wilson on the lysine pricing matter.

'Government's action ... borders on being ludicrous'

Other examples of the government's questionable tactics abound
throughout this book.

For example, Department of Justice lawyers not only failed to
convince Federal Judge Blanche Manning that Andreas and Wilson
deserved the maximum three years in jail, but were berated by her as
she meted out Andreas' and Wilson's fines.

Federal prosecutors had sought a $25 million fine and three years
in prison, the maximum allowable, against Andreas, saying the fine
reflected the amount of money allegedly reaped from the price-fixing
scheme, which spanned from 1992 through 1995. Andreas and Wilson
claimed that the $25 million figure didn't equate with the amount of
lysine produced in the world during the scheme and sought proof from
overseas lysine producers who allegedly participated in the
conspiracy.

But Judge Manning said the government merely wrote letters to the
lysine producers "informing them that they were not obliged to
produce documents." She called the government's action "so incredible
that it bordered on being ludicrous."

By way of contrast, Purdue University agricultural economics
professor John Connor estimates that customers buying lysine from ADM
and its co-conspirators between 1992 and 1995 paid prices elevated
due to the conspiracy in the range of $150 million to $160 million.
ADM and its co-conspirators early on offered to settle for $45
million which implied a $15 million overcharge. Connor estimates the
actual overcharge was ten times higher, despite the fact that the
government only fined ADM $100 million.

Not just in this instance, but in a number of other areas the
Justice Department's actions remain questionable. Lieber, for
example, asks why Dwayne Andreas was never investigated. "The heads
of this organization [ADM], where there was a valid criminal
investigation taking place, not only received immunity from
prosecution, but were never interviewed. And I don't mean not
interviewed by a grand jury, but not interviewed by anyone in law
enforcement."

As the author observes, "it seems like the power of this company
resulted in this unusual deal. This is one of the questions that I
simply cannot find an answer to. The government won't comment on it.
We are not talking about national security here. We are talking about
something that should be well within the public domain, and you can't
get an answer to this. And there are other questions like this. In
the book, I list major unanswered questions."

Most productive informant

Throughout Lieber's tale of a corrupt and manipulative corporate
culture the complex, often mysterious and unexplainable person who
ultimately allowed both the heartland and a jury to witness the inner
workings of that corporate culture is explored.

"Even after days of intimate conversation with Mark Whitacre,"
Lieber writes, "it was difficult to trust him a hundred percent. This
was not because his explanations about [competitors] and the
off-the-books bonuses have altered over the years ... ADM fixed
markets on a worldwide basis. It cheated us all. The fact that
Whitacre took advantage of such a company was not the block that kept
me from believing him completely. Rather, it was the fact that he had
broken faith with those on his side who had tried to help, his
psychiatrist and his lawyers. I liked Mark Whitacre, applauded his
contribution to antitrust law enforcement, and admired the way he
coped with his broken life and disproportioned punishment."

While Lieber makes no pretense that his ADM saga is intended to be
objective, it is a fair book showing both the flaws of the
government's prosecution, the manipulations of both the government,
ADM and Mick Andreas, Terrance Wilson and Mark Whitacre's attorneys,
and the myriad of questions still left unanswered by ADM and the
government.

Whether this book will receive the attention that it deserves from
the national corporate-controlled media it is a must read for those
who are concerned about the so-called "free market system", the
growing corporate concentration in agribusiness which allows
corporations to not only freely operate in their own self-serving
interests, but allows them to corrupt and destroy our democratic
institutions and rape Lady Justice.

Reading Lieber's cogent, provocative examination of corporate
greed and corruption this reviewer, already quite familiar with the
facts of the case, nevertheless, had the unsettling feeling, after
fines had been paid, executives had gone to jail, lives ruined, that
in the end corporate crime does pay!

That suspicion was readily confirmed in the days soon after
reading Lieber's book, for my colleague, national syndicated farm
columnist Alan Guebert, reports that in the July 27 Federal
Register, the USDA proposed to pay ag processors up to $450
million to make ethanol from America's ever-growing piles of
grain.

Under the quietly offered plan, USDA hopes to make quarterly
payments to some 50-plus bio-energy makers over the next three years
to make fuel. "If adopted," Guebert reports, "USDA could end up
paying Archer Daniels Midland, the admitted price-fixer which
produces 42% of the nation's ethanol, $189 million."

When Guebert explained that fact to one farmer-caller recently,
the farmer's only reply was, "So ADM gets back its $100 million price
fixing fine with interest."

A.V. Krebs, director of the Corporate Agribusiness Research
Project, P.O. Box 2201, Everett, WA 98203-0201; web site
(www.ea1.com/CARP), is author of The Corporate Reapers: The
Book of Agribusiness (Essential Books: 1992)